


at least they're not the Papin sisters, or: folie a deux

by imustgofirst



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, F/F, F/M, Flashbacks, Head Jumping, Incredibly Self-Indulgent, Murder, Porn With Plot, Sibling Incest, Soap Opera, Spellcest, assertive hilda, dubious tense shifts, historical fiction - Freeform, overwrought zelda, sisters literally doing it for themselves, super porny
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-26
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-17 07:35:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17556071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imustgofirst/pseuds/imustgofirst
Summary: Look kids, it's spellcest porn with an obscure title and historical flashbacks!





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The second half is rated very E. 
> 
> Come chill with the pervs at together-as-sisters.tumblr.com, but don't @ us. #theyrecannibals

“That’ll be $3.99, luv,” Hilda chirps. “Cash or card?”

“Uh, card,” replies Rosalind, handing over her debit card in exchange for the mocha. Their fingers brush. _What if she hexes me? That’s a thing witches do, right?_

The girl’s eyes dart nervously to the side, and Hilda smiles, all kindness. “Only to those who deserve it, and never to one of Sabrina’s friends.”

Roz looks even more appalled, leaves an outsized tip in her haste to get away, and Hilda realizes her mistake. Thought-reading is a power not all magic folk develop, and those who do, like Hilda, acquire the ability only after a couple of centuries, by which time they can control it; usually she hears the inner workings of humans’ minds only as white noise.

When a mortal is thinking about Hilda, though, it’s another story. She is careful in most situations, because she vastly prefers not to know; it’s easy enough to put up a sort of magic filter. Occasionally, like today, she is caught off guard.

“Oops,” she says under her breath. She makes a mental note to give Roz a free cookie the next time she comes in.

Zelda once confessed to Hilda that she hears human thoughts like screams; she struggles to turn the volume down. It’s no wonder she chooses to spend her time with corpses.

But Hilda likes being around people; she finds the background noise soothing and companionable, unlike the silence at home. Humans interest her. She is intrigued by their perspectives, their logic, their approaches to their so-short lives and relationships. She’d never say so, but she thinks some of them have got the fundamentals right where witches have gone wrong. Surely love and kindness are better ends than lust and power?

The ability to read fellow witches’ thoughts is much rarer. Zelda doesn’t possess it. As far as she knows, neither does her sister.

Two little girls, maybe five and eight, make their way to the counter, the bigger confidently leading the smaller by the hand. Hilda is reminded of her own childhood. When Zelda wasn’t inexpertly hexing Hilda to the nether realm, she was dragging her around by her chubby little hand. Hilda was never happier than when she was allowed to be her big sister’s shadow. Maybe that’s why she feels it so strongly, the wordless surge of affection of the younger girl for the older, unadulterated hero-worship flowing out as the eight-year-old orders a hot fudge sundae with two spoons.

“We’re sharing but I get more,” she instructs her sibling, “because I’m bigger.” The five-year-old nods solemnly, unquestioning.

Hilda remembers what it felt like to have that much faith in your big sister. It lasted right up to the first night of her harrowing, to say nothing of the countless deaths that have followed.

Hilda still loves Zelda, but only trusts her so far. She isn’t stupid. Outsiders, witch or mortal, might say that Hilda’s decision to continue living in the family home suggests otherwise; but outsiders will never understand.

When they aren’t fighting like cats and dogs, Hilda often overhears humans think of their siblings as “best friends.” This concept hasn’t gained traction in the witch community. Zelda is not Hilda’s “best friend,” nor is Hilda hers.

They’re too intertwined for that.

Zelda, for good or ill, has been the one constant in Hilda’s life, and vice versa. In a witch’s long lifetime, relationships, even long-term ones, are temporary. The most monogamous love wears out after a few centuries. Family is the only exception, and Hilda’s family is Zelda. (Ambrose and Sabrina too, of course, but it’s not the same as sharing an origin. Zelda is the one who has been there, in the background or, more often, in the foreground, since Hilda drew her first breath.)

Their parents died young by witching standards — a hex gone wrong in Mother’s case, an undetected blood curse in Father’s — but still things might have been different if Edward had lived. If he hadn’t gone and left his sisters behind, a desperate dyad.

Things _might_ have been different. Hilda doesn’t think so.

It all started so long before that.

A sharp pain brings Hilda out of her reverie. It is immediately followed by another, what feels like a stinging lash across her back. Unprepared, she almost doubles over, and has to grip the counter for support.

“Hilda?”

Cerberus is there instantly, one hand on her back. She can’t find it in her to be grateful.

“Suddenly I’m feeling a little under the weather.”

“You should get home right away,” he says, wide-eyed. “You look pale.”

He can’t possibly tell under the self-tanner, but it’s difficult to carry on a conversation while invisible stinging blows rain down upon you. “I think that would be for the best.”

-

“What have you been getting up to, then?”

Zelda jumps at the sound of the oh-so-familiar voice she hadn’t expected to emerge from the shadows. “You’re home early. Tired at last of consorting with mortals?”

“You’re not going to tell me?”

Zelda frowns at her sister’s unusual persistence. “It isn’t your concern,” she says, closing the front door, shutting them both into a house of whispers and secrets.

Hilda sighs. “At least let me see to your back,” she says. “You don’t want it getting infected.”

-

Zelda inherited the most dangerous traits of both her parents, Mother’s tempestuousness uneasily yoked to Father’s need to control. Their marriage was seldom peaceful. Neither is their older daughter.

Zelda doesn’t know how to love without controlling. For her, love _is_ control. She discerns what’s best for her family when they falter, and pushes them in the right direction. What could be a purer expression of loving care?

Even within the family, though, Hilda is special.

Hilda is _hers_. She always has been, always will be, no matter where she sleeps or attends baptisms or how she whores herself out to humans. They’ve existed within this understanding for centuries, but now, suddenly, Hilda is disregarding it. Zelda loathes the scent she brings home, a mixture of coffee and grease and him, his brutish mortal lust all over her.

It began in utero. Zelda was four and very much a little queen when Mother’s waistline began to swell. Zelda was mistrustful, deeply superstitious of a rival for her parents’ and brother’s attention.

“It’s a little sister for you, Zee,” Father told her seriously. “Otherwise, with whom will you play all day while Edward is at the academy?” Because Edward, just six, had received the Dark Lord’s unholy call, and special arrangements had been made. Already he was leaving his sister behind, thoughts filled with things other than their shared games in the meadows and dense forest. “Why, she’ll be so new and helpless, darling, she’ll need you to teach her everything.”

“She’ll be your very own responsibility,” Mother said — characteristically, as she wasn’t the most maternal of women, happiest alone with her potions and hexes. “A way for you to show the Dark Lord what a good, smart girl you are.”

By the time Zelda realized Father had been placating, Mother opportunistic, it was too late: Hilda was hers.

And after more than two centuries, she still strikes Zelda as new and helpless. There is something light in her that refuses to be extinguished.

But Zelda will keep trying. It’s her responsibility, her duty, and duty is sacred. Duty brought her back from the four corners of the earth to be here when Edward’s human wife birthed a witch babe, to guide the mortal woman through the ordeal for which she was biologically and psychologically unprepared, no matter how much Zelda disapproved of the match. Duty kept her here to watch over that little tow-headed child, and then, tragically, to become a surrogate mother and father to her. Another new, helpless baby in the Spellman clan, another sweet-smelling responsibility all Zelda’s own.

There is Hilda, of course, to help, and Hilda is helpful indeed in dispensing hugs, bedtime stories, and patience. But Zelda never forgets that Hilda too is her responsibility.

And Ambrose. Jointly, Edward and the Dark Lord gave him to her, entrusting Zelda to right the ballast.

So far, it’s all she can do to keep the whole lot of them, herself included, from sinking and drowning.

-

Zelda is quiet while Hilda applies salve and a healing spell. Unlike last time, she holds herself regally, unashamed.

Hilda’s eyes swim with unshed worry. She says nothing about the stinging pain that sent her rushing home to await the inevitable.

-

Later Hilda summons all her courage and tries to talk to Zelda — not about this sixth, or is it seventh, sense she has developed, but about Zelda’s recently discovered flair for self-mutilation.

It doesn’t go well. At least the butcher knife is so sharp that it barely stings. She looks down at it penetrating between her ribs, feels her consciousness dissociating from her body, thinks _Here we go again._

It takes a long time for her to return. Part of her doesn’t want to. When she relaxes into it, the grave is like a womb.

It’s daylight again. Hilda thinks with some small satisfaction of the disapproving looks Ambrose and Sabrina will have given Zelda over Hilda’s empty seat at the dinner table.

_Speaking of_. She feels Zelda’s gaze riveted to her. Usually the older sister gives herself something to do, hides behind a book or a newspaper. Not this time.

She doesn’t offer to help, doesn’t do anything but watch. As Hilda awkwardly throws herself upon the ground, her legs cold and stiff, lungs stinging with the December air, the younger witch’s ire begins to rise. She stalks toward the porch, gait ungainly, feeling much more like the bride of Frankenstein than she does in the costume.

“Isn’t it enough to kill me time and again?” she demands before Zelda can begin. “Are you so sick, so sadistic, that you need the pleasure of watching me claw my way back as well?”

It comes as a surprise, the wave of melancholy and despair that hits her, and it takes her a second to realize the feelings aren’t her own, or at least haven’t originated with her; they're an echo.

“It gives me no pleasure.”

“You wouldn’t do it if it didn’t.”

Zelda makes no move to stop her as Hilda brushes by her.

Hilda turns the water on hotter than she prefers, the way Zelda likes it, as Zelda’s feelings continue to roil through her. Hilda becomes angrier and angrier.

How dare Zelda grieve? How dare she luxuriate in her pain and self-hatred when she has created this, has made the choice time and again?

It’s the scent of self-pity that does it in the end.

Clean and starving, Hilda goes down to the kitchen. She removes the pot of soup she’d been making yesterday from the fridge, ladles two servings out and puts them on the burner to warm. The actions are automatic: nurturing, nourishing.

She feels neither.

The way Zelda stares at her with bottomless blue eyes makes her queasy.

“You’re feeling quite sorry for yourself over there, aren’t you? Must be inconvenient, all that stabbing and digging.”

There is an unusual rawness to Zelda’s emotions, like her flayed skin. “I — You don’t know what it’s like, the waiting.”

Hilda gapes in incredulity. “And you don’t know what it’s like, the dying! I can’t believe you. You sit there like Satan himself, doling out punishment as you see fit, and you honestly believe you’re the one who suffers most.”

“It _is_ worse for me, sister!”

Hilda stares at her, aghast.

Zelda’s tears spill over. She looks tortured. “I’ve always loved you more than you’ve loved me.”

Disbelief is succeeded by the only possible response to such blind, monstrous narcissism: fury. It catches fire, races through her veins like hell flame. She has never felt anything like it, scorching and pure.

One blow carefully aimed at her skull sends Zelda to her knees. The heavy, sickening force of the rolling pin making contact with flesh and bone resonates up her arm, stuns Hilda, and she freezes.

Zelda slowly lifts herself from the cold tile, and Hilda waits for her to fight back. She needs her older sister to grab the butcher knife again, or to seize the rolling pin and turn it on her — anything to prevent her from doing this thing, and to keep Hilda the person she has always believed herself to be.

But Zelda goes no further than her knees. She kneels as if in supplication. There is a new light in her eyes, frenzied, unholy. She doesn’t look or sound like herself.

“Yes,” Zelda encourages, sounding almost reverent. “Yes. Do it, Hilda. Kill me.”

Hilda does.

-

Zelda is stronger than she looks.

Hilda has always known this, but now she means in physical terms. Hilda is the heavier of the two, and it takes her an inordinately long time to get her sister’s dead weight from the kitchen to the side door. Her lungs and muscles burn. She feels as if her arms will fall off. How does Zelda manage it?

For an instant she opens her mouth to ask, turning to her big sister the habit of a lifetime. But this inert thing sprawled half indoors, half out, isn’t her big sister.

Except that it is.

Hilda has reduced her — her tyrant, her tormentor — to this. Power, rich and heady, buzzes in her head.

Zelda must have bitten her lip when Hilda hit her just before death. Now a thin trickle of blood runs down her chin. The blood is shockingly bright against her pallid skin, but not as bright as Zelda’s own flame should burn.

Hilda has reduced the love of her life, the other half of her being, to this.

She can’t think. She flops down awkwardly in the open doorway and sobs.

Ambrose finds them like this, a demented tableau.

Hilda’s body is wracked by heaving, agonized sobs. She has Zelda’s head in her lap, cradling it protectively. Ambrose feels that he has intruded on something unbearably intimate.

After he softly calls her name several times, Hilda lifts her head. Ambrose will take the haunted look in her eyes to his own grave. “I killed her,” she sobs. “I _killed_ her.”

“It’s all right, Auntie.” It’s not, but it will be. Their nephew will see to it. He crouches, hand on Hilda’s shoulder as his gaze sweeps over his other aunt. “How long has it been? We need to get her into the ground.”

Hilda stares at him like she’s trying to focus.

“Even the magic of the Cain pit only works so long after death,” he explains in the same gentle voice, because she has never been the one to deal with this aspect of it. “Do you know how long since — how long she’s been in this condition?”

“I was going to reheat the vegetable soup,” she replies tonelessly.

“So, before lunch,” he surmises, darting a hasty look at the wall clock. That could have been more than an hour ago; it could have also been less. As Ambrose fervently prays for the latter, he works to keep his expression neutral.

If Auntie Zee doesn’t come back, or comes back irreparably damaged, it will destroy Auntie Hilda.

It’s impossible to think of one of them without the other.

He’s stronger than he looks too, and he briskly gets Zelda into a fireman’s carry. Hilda follows, wincing as Zelda’s bare foot bangs against the door. “It won’t hurt her,” Ambrose promises. The irony is lost on them.

He digs like a madman, racing against the clock, and is glad Hilda is too shellshocked to notice. She helps, moving small, precise shovel loads of rich black soil.

When they have finished, Hilda sits down right beside the newly turned earth and announces her intention to wait.

“Let’s get you cleaned up first,” Ambrose replies. “What will Aunt Zelda say if she sees you in this state? Then you can come back and wait.”

-

She surges to consciousness gasping for air, choking and scrambling and fighting the darkness that encloses her. She knows this feeling, throat and eyes and ears filled with dirt, and turns her head to cough.

Nothing comes up when she retches. She finds herself looking at clean white sheets, realizes Ambrose must have put foxglove in her tea.

Hilda is out of bed in an instant. “I’m coming!” she cries, praying to anyone who will listen that her sister will somehow hear.

-

Climbing out of a grave, even a shallow, hastily dug one with none of the formalities, isn’t easy. One hand rests claw-like atop the earth while Zelda tips her head back and feasts on sweet air.

“I’ve got you, I’ve got you, sister.”

Hilda smells clean and fresh, just like when she was a baby and Zelda would press her nose to the downy crown of her sister’s head and inhale. Zelda’s only coherent thought is that she will get herself all dirty.

But her grasping fingers and tugging arms feel nice, if not terribly effective, and Zelda rests against her.

It’s dark out, and cold, but Zelda feels her heart beating, pumping blood through her veins. Her skin tingles.

Hilda sobs wetly against her ear, apologies tripping off her tongue. She is abject, expecting wrath and begging for it.

Wrath would be absolution. Zelda feels strangely content. She is a withholding bitch even in resurrection.

Hilda spirits her into the house and up the stairs, as if she might have forgotten the way. Hilda is trembling from head to foot; her older sister is steady. Zelda sits on the lid of the toilet and watches her adjust the shower until the water is hot enough to steam.

This is the worst part, the remorse, the guilt, the shame. The sense of unworthiness. In her darkest fantasies Zelda has envisioned exactly this scene, and has thrilled at prolonging her sister’s delicious agony. Climbing out of a pit and washing away a few beetles is nothing to this.

And yet now that it’s happening, Zelda feels magnanimous.

“It’s all right,” she soothes. “It’s all right. I deserved it.”

Hilda stops sobbing abruptly but looks even more distraught. “No,” she whispers, “no, Zelda, you didn’t deserve it, and I’ve never deserved it either, except the first time. It’s nothing but an awful, depraved dance, and I can’t do it any more.”

“All right,” Zelda says. She will say anything, promise anything Hilda wants if it will only keep her there.

“You don’t understand.” Hilda looks at her with wide eyes filled with bewildered pain. “I hate you for pushing and pushing and making me into someone who could do this, and I hate myself more for doing it.”

“I do understand,” Zelda returns, her voice heated with the fire of a dozen lifetimes. “Haven’t you done as much to me scores of times? It’s much easier to be the victim.” She shakes her head. “I didn’t make you kill me. I’ve never been able to make you do anything.”

The truth of it takes Hilda’s breath. Brought up short, she stares at her sister, and Zelda stares back.

“It’s the path of night, sister,” Zelda says after a long, weighty silence. Hilda realizes she has been holding her breath.

Zelda stands and begins to disrobe, until there is a pile of dirt and expensive fabric on the bathroom floor. Hilda’s eyes follow every movement. Although they routinely dress and undress in the same room, she hasn’t seen Zelda completely nude in decades; whatever else Hilda is feeling, the spectacle is too alluring for her to look away.

“The path of night,” Hilda echoes. She’d signed her name in the book. Perhaps that was when Satan himself had planted the seed.

—

When Zelda was twelve and Hilda eight, their parents separated. This wasn’t unusual: together for over a century, the period since their children’s birth was by far the longest they’d managed to spend cohabiting. They weren’t suited to living together, Father with his preference for quiet and the old texts, Mother with her penchant for company and excitement.

It ripped Zelda’s world apart, and she put it back together a little crooked, filled with studying and silence and the brightly colored cards that came in the post from Mother and said “A kiss from Hilda!” down in the bottom right corner.

Being alone with Father and Edward was hardly an unmixed joy. She was fascinated by their conversations on esoteric subjects, but Father only allowed her to listen and observe. Sometimes Edward sent sympathetic grimaces her way, but sometimes he said, “It isn’t the Dark Lord’s will for girls to discuss such matters.”

She had been trying to get rid of Hilda for eight years, and now she had succeeded, and it was exactly what she didn’t want.

With the magical thinking of childhood, she decided it would be good again when her sister came back.

As it happened, Hilda didn’t come back, not to stay, for eight years — a blink of the eye for an adult witch, a lifetime to a child.

\--  
When it happens, Zelda is sixteen and heading off to the academy, too grown-up and proud to have any use for the mother who (as she sees it) abandoned her; still, she waits at the window for her first glimpse of the carriage, her regal features alight with a child’s excitement.

Hilda is still a child, in body and mind, and she is anxious, frightened. Part of her remembers the sounds and smells and harshly enunciated consonants of this land, but still they are foreign. She resents being sent ahead with a maid while Mother attends a round of seasonal fetes in Boston. She timidly alights from the carriage, nearly slipping into the mud, sees a poised red-headed young woman who can’t be her beloved playmate of the freckled cheeks and scraped knees.

“Hilda?” asks this not-Zelda, her voice strange, a woman’s voice.

Hilda bursts into tears and runs past her into the house.

Zelda holds a grudge with the ferocity of a thousand-year-old witch and the impulsivity of a child. Sensitive and proud, starved for affection, her sister’s rejection scalds.

She doesn’t try again.

—

Zelda goes to the academy, where she ascends to the throne. No one can compete with the Spellman siblings in terms of charisma, intelligence, or intensity. Edward may be destined for greatness in the church, but Zelda is simply destined to be great.

Home for holidays, she largely ignores her small, clumsy sister.

Edward graduates and goes off to Satan knows where; Hilda arrives with her overstuffed trunk and retinue of spiders. Zelda is both embarrassed and furious: Hilda doesn’t need familiars to protect her when she has Zelda.

They harrow her mercilessly, Zelda the ringleader. As they leave her by the hanging tree, Hilda cries out, “What have I done, sister, to make you hate me?” in the accent that still grates painfully on her older sister’s ears.

She has missed the point entirely. Zelda must do this because she loves Hilda; otherwise the youngest Spellman will never be respected by her peers.

Hilda is her responsibility.

-

Hilda dreads half-term more than she dreads remaining at the academy. Dreary days alone with her tormentor stretch before her, because as much as she quails in Zelda’s presence, she withers in her absence.

Then suddenly they are sisters again.

Zelda expresses no remorse for the harrowing; she does not suddenly become tender or gentle, qualities she has never aspired to. But when it is just the two of them in the familiar woods, they laugh and romp and play like children rather than the young adults they’ve become. Hilda chases her, and eventually, when the smaller witch is panting and has a stitch in her side, Zelda lets herself be caught. Zelda reads aloud, scandalous poetry. They weave leaves through one another’s hair. They talk about the shapes in the clouds. One looks like a dragon, and Zelda says she will go to China and see for herself what magic such beasts may have left behind. When Hilda droops, she says, “You’ll come too — you can carry my valise.”

And then Hilda ruins it.

She has snatched Zelda’s sketch pad and darted away with it just for the thrill of being chased; when her big sister’s slender form engulfs her from behind, her very cells sing with joy. She stops abruptly, and Zelda’s momentum brings them to the ground.

Hilda is not that ticklish, but Zelda knows just the places on her sides and belly that will make her writhe and shriek for mercy. She twists and wriggles, trying to escape Zelda’s touch but never wanting it to stop, and now she is on her back. Above her, Zelda grips her wrists to hold her still.

They’re both gasping for breath, chests heaving against one another, when Hilda feels it, that secret tingly feeling she gets from reading the most explicit passages in the novels she orders from abroad and hides under her bed tied up in brown paper and string. It swells from where Zelda’s pelvis presses against hers, the bump of their pubic bones, and Hilda feels the untutored urge to spread her legs, to rock against something.

They are still eye to eye and nose to nose, and Hilda is frantic because it’s not supposed to be like this, but Zelda’s warm, slightly sour breath fanning across her lips makes a pulse pound between Hilda’s legs and her nipples grow tight and hard.

Zelda’s eyes are darkest blue.

_Yes_ , Hilda thinks, a prayer and a plea. _Yes, sweet Satan._

She closes her eyes, holds her breath, waiting for her first kiss.

She gets a moss-covered rock to the temple and her first sojourn in the Cain pit.


	2. Chapter 2

Zelda stands straight and proud as the last of the muddy water sluices down the drain, and then stoops, reaching for the stopper. “And now a bath.”

 

Her frank, appraising gaze still hasn’t wavered from Hilda, who can’t look away. Surely this is too intimate even for sisters. It is like a challenge, and Hilda can’t help but rise to it. 

 

Zelda is naked, but Hilda feels exposed. Her heart is thundering; she knows Zelda’s eyes haven’t missed her tell-tale pulse.

 

With candles and drawn shades this bathroom can be a calming oasis, but Zelda has left the shade up, the harsh lights on. There is a draft. They might as well be downstairs, Zelda’s nude body on the embalming table. 

 

Hilda’s breath catches. _She’s_ _alive_ , _she’s_ _alive_ , she reminds herself, finally breaking their eye contact to scrutinize Zelda. Not only can she see every healing bruise and scrape, but the slow encroaching of age, each tiny wrinkle and imperfection.

 

Zelda angles her head even more haughtily. She is doing this on purpose, mistress of aesthetics and illusions that she is, displaying herself in the most unflattering way. But why?

 

 _To_ _repel_ _you_ , whispers a little voice in Hilda’s ear, her own voice.

 

That would never work. They could both be ancient crones, and Hilda would still want her.

 

Hilda’s age-old shame overwhelms her, and she drags her eyes back up to her sister’s, afraid of what she will see there. In this one thing Zelda has been uncharacteristically kind. She has never made mention of that late spring afternoon so long ago.

 

But now Hilda has fought back, and the time for kindness is over.

 

“Join me, sister,” Zelda says, unflinching, extending a hand. “You’re covered in earth from the pit.”

 

-

 

Hilda has often wished that first blow to the head had knocked this - her true darkness, her abiding desire, her secret shame - out of her. It’s not normal or acceptable, even among witches. This fact does nothing to strengthen her relationship with the Dark Lord. What good is “Do what thou wilt” when there is an unspoken  _ but  _ exempting the only thing she has ever really craved?

 

Truly, it’s not fear of the Dark Lord that has prevented her from acting. 

 

It’s Zelda.

 

Zelda with her admirers and flings, her painted, cruel, covetable mouth that could whisper love or curses in a score of languages.

 

Because if Zelda learned the truth and spurned her, Hilda would lose the small part of her sister she does have, and she couldn’t survive that.

 

-

 

Hilda snuck a secret piece of her sister, just once. It’s probably the only time she has gotten away with anything where Zelda was concerned.

 

Their paths crossed and briefly joined some time after Hilda had left the academy, but when they were still all too young to be expected to settle down to the business of marrying and producing little witches and warlocks. Edward was doing research on animism in what’s now Zimbabwe, Zelda was involved in excavating something in the Valley of the Kings, and Hilda was magicking biscuits and healing salves by the cartload for the soldiers in what would become South Africa. The three siblings met at Edward’s behest, took possession of a boat and meandered up the Zambezi for a few weeks.

 

Hilda liked seeing the hippos emerge from the water to graze, loved watching the elephants snort and splash in the watering holes.

 

She did not like being in the next room, separated by only a Japanese silk screen, when Zelda decided to bring back whomever caught her eye and fuck until sunrise. 

 

Zelda didn’t bother being quiet or discreet.

 

Edward, like Zelda in many ways, found her exploits perfect fodder for breakfast conversation. Hilda hated the bruises Zelda didn’t cover, the ribald laughter over toast and tea.

 

One night, the screen wasn’t fully drawn.

 

Zelda looked like a demoness, long hair loose, milky skin gleaming in the flickering lamplight. Hilda tucked herself into a small, frightened ball on the far side of her own bed, and couldn’t look away.

 

She doesn’t remember the man’s features, just the way Zelda’s lips looked wrapped around his cock. It filled her with sick rage and lust, and she was thankful Zelda’s playmate for the evening wasn’t a woman — she couldn’t have stood that.

 

She had felt like Zelda’s gaze had dispelled the darkness to look straight into her. Hilda wouldn’t put it past her; Zelda had always been an exhibitionist.

 

The man groaned as he came, his hips jerking against Zelda, smearing her perfect lipstick. Her fingernails sank into his buttocks, drawing blood. Hilda, who had strictly refrained from touching herself, shattered with a squeeze of her thighs and a gasp of surprise.

 

Still shuddering, she pulled the covers over her head and rolled to face the wall. She cried herself to sleep.

 

-

 

“I won’t fit,” Hilda protests feebly. Instantly the bathtub doubles in size, and Zelda bares her teeth, half smile, half sneer.

 

The water is too hot. Zelda delights in watching Hilda flush deep pink from her toes to her ears.

 

Zelda continues to smirk as Hilda arranges herself at one end and tucks her knees under her chin, hiding as much as possible.

 

They haven’t done this since they were children.

 

The tears well up suddenly, surprising Hilda, giving her no chance to will them away. Zelda looks stricken.

 

“What is it?” she asks, her tone much softer than Hilda expects. One wet hand lands upon her back. “Hilda, what’s the matter?”

 

In the face of her sister’s concern, Hilda begins to cry in earnest. “I meant it,” she manages. “I can’t do this any more. You can’t keep killing me. You’ll make me hate you, and I can’t live with hating you.”

 

All she has ever wanted is love.

 

Zelda doesn’t answer in words. She dips a fresh washcloth into the water, and begins to soap Hilda’s arm. She is every bit as gentle as when she used to bathe baby Sabrina.

 

“Hilda,” she says finally. “Sister, you know I love you.”

 

Hilda looks at her then, and her expression is one Zelda can’t read.

 

Hilda’s mouth twists. “So you said. More than I love you.” It hangs between them. “Is that why you do it?”

 

“No.” Something in Zelda’s face changes, and her throat works. “Yes. I don’t -“

 

Their hands catch, intertwine just above the surface of the water. “You  _ do _ know,” Hilda protests, gentle but firm.

 

They stare at one another, barely breathing. 

 

“As do you,” the older witch says on a thin thread of sound.

 

Hilda feels the low, insistent throb of her sister’s desire like a second heartbeat, echoing her own. Eyes still locked, she watches Zelda breathe into the wave, undulate into it. Hilda’s clit twitches and she gasps.

 

“Zelda, this is — depraved.”

 

“Wicked,” she agrees, low and breathy. It’s unclear who moved, but their faces are close, close enough for Hilda to brush her nose to her sister’s cheek. Steam rises from the water. The past echoes around them.

 

Zelda kisses her.

 

It is two centuries overdue and not her first. But as she feels Zelda striving to rein herself in, trembling with the effort of remaining gentle, Hilda decides it has been worth the wait.

 

Hilda lifts a hand to Zelda’s neck, her thumb rubbing the rigid muscles. She has always imagined it like this.

 

Now that it’s happening, she finds she doesn’t want gentleness. She wants Zelda.

 

“Zelda, please. I want—“

 

-

 

Hilda doesn’t finish the sentence.

 

Zelda wants, too. Has wanted, will want.

 

Hilda kisses her back.

 

Zelda died and was reborn and Hilda is kissing her back.

 

The logic is there, somewhere, even if she can’t draw it out, A to B so C, as she normally would. Hilda killed her, she was reborn, and now things are different. Everything has shifted, subtle and cataclysmic.

 

They are alike.

 

Hilda is still so good, but maybe no longer too good for this, for Zelda and her profane touch.

 

Hilda’s wide mouth and luscious lips are all promise and possibility, and Zelda is caught between wanting to devour her and the desire to remain suspended in this rare moment of sweetness.

 

And then Hilda bites her.

 

It’s tentative, inexpert, and she draws back immediately. Zelda growls, and Hilda looks scared, the way she looks when Zelda has a sharp object.

 

Zelda bites back. Her ear, her jaw, the lovely curve of her throat, so warm and alive, blood pumping beneath Zelda’s teeth.

 

Hilda closes her eyes on a whimper. She tips her head back, arches her neck. 

 

Gives herself up to the Dark Lord, to his most unholy, beautiful servant. If Dark Baptism had promised this, she wouldn’t have hesitated to sign her name in the book.

 

Zelda’s mouth fastens to her pulse point, sucks to the point of pain, very definitely leaving her own witch’s mark.

 

Maybe, Hilda thinks frantically, maybe Lord Satan gave her Zelda to entice her along the path. Maybe this has been inevitable all along.

 

Maybe she just wants it to be inevitable.

 

She opens her eyes because she cannot get enough of the way Zelda looks, the way Zelda looks at her.

 

Her sister rises out of the water, hair streaming darkly over her shoulders, to pin Hilda back and down against the porcelaine. The water laps at Hilda’s nostrils, making her choke. “I could drown you.”

 

This, Hilda knows, is a test. Her fingers close around the straight razor oh-so-coincidentally laying on the lip of the tub. As she brings it to her sister’s throat, she pushes with her legs, freeing herself enough to say, “I could slit your throat. But I’m not going to.” She moves the blade away, careful to drop it onto the floor, and encourages Zelda to lean forward until their foreheads touch. “And you’re not going to drown me, love. Neither will you stab, bludgeon, poison, asphyxiate, defenestrate -“

 

Zelda crushes their mouths together, kissing her desperately. Hilda tastes blood and has to open her eyes to clear the vision of Zelda’s lifeless body, that single trickle.  

 

She’d hit her and hit her with so much more force than necessary, intent on battering her beautiful, impossible brain until it couldn’t do any more damage. Now her hands shake as they cup Zelda’s skull and she presses her lips to her sister’s forehead, her temples, the corner of her eye. 

 

Zelda is saying something over and over. When Hilda makes herself listen above the thundering of her heart, she hears, “Never, never, never.”

 

Hilda’s eyes sting. “Penitence doesn’t suit you.”

 

Zelda rolls her eyes, proving that she is still herself. “I won’t hurt you,” she promises.

 

“You will. Maybe I want it to hurt. I want everything.”

 

Slowly Zelda smiles, a devilish light in her eyes. “Only a good hurt,” she allows. 

 

-

 

In none of the realms can Hilda say the words “I want to fuck your mouth.” That’s the image that pops into her mind, though, when Zelda demands, “Tell me what you want.”

 

What she had wanted most of all was to see and touch and taste Zelda, and to her everlasting amazement, she has already been permitted to do just that. No teasing, no taunting, just a banquet of milky skin and rosy nipples, of soft sighs of satisfaction and little grunts and “ah, there.” Tomorrow there will be mouth-shaped bruises on her neck, her breasts, the smooth soft plain of her abdomen. And when Hilda faltered, shy and nervous, afraid of ruining it, a husky voice murmuring “Like this,” fingers moving in tandem, Zelda’s flesh slick and swollen, open, begging to be stroked (Zelda hissing, “This is for you”), until the older witch cried out, short and sharp, and went rigid in her embrace. 

 

“Tell me what you want” — and if she doesn’t, if she can’t, it will mean failure. Failing Zelda. She freezes, seizes up.

 

She tells herself to substitute something else, words she can actually say. But the image is so vivid. It has haunted her since that humid African night so long ago.

 

The pause has been too long. Zelda is sitting up on the edge of the bed and frowning down at her, and the air has gone cool.

 

“If you want to… damage me,” the older witch says carefully, after the silence has become burdensome, “that would be all right.”

 

Hilda sits up so fast that her head collides with her sister’s jaw. “No!” She is horrified. “No, I’d never want that, Zelds, and I could never do it, unless --”

 

She runs out of steam, up against the hard place of her fear that this is the reason today was the day. Zelda is frowning still, lips pursed, like Hilda is the hardest puzzle she’s ever tried to work.

 

“Is that something you, ah, need?”

 

Zelda’s expression turns incredulous. “ _ What? _ ”

 

Hilda thinks she has ruined everything again, until Zelda laughs and cups her head, rubbing gently where Hilda will have a goose-egg tomorrow. “Satan, sister, what have you been thinking of me all these years?”

 

Hilda goes tomato red. Still, embarrassment isn’t too high a price to pay for relief. She doesn’t think she could hurt her sister again even if Zelda did need it. “You must admit it seems p-possible,” she manages.

 

“Ah, you have much to learn, little sister.” Zelda's hand moves to stroke her bottom lip. It is the smug, worldly tone Hilda usually hates, as if Zelda is so knowledgeable and cosmopolitan and Hilda is the village maiden — but this time it’s true, and Hilda only shivers at the thought of all Zelda can teach her. “Exploring the limits of pleasure and pain can be exquisite. But all in due course.”

 

The ominous sound of that makes Hilda shiver in both anticipation and dread. Zelda continues to play with her mouth, the pads of her fingers dragging over Hilda’s full lower lip; the shiver this draws is pure pleasure.

 

“You haven’t answered me, Hilda.”

 

She is blushing again, bless it.

 

She stares hard at Zelda’s mouth, and allows herself to summon the images from her memory in a kind of mute, desperate frenzy. 

 

Hilda doesn’t know that it’s mind-reading, exactly, but she doesn’t know it’s not. Zelda’s fierce smile is devastatingly sexy.

 

“Do you like to watch, sister?”

 

She gulps. She doesn’t know the answer, really. Watching Zelda and that man, a man whose name Zelda has probably forgotten or never knew, was titillating and repulsive, formative and scarring.

 

“I don’t just want to watch,” she manages. Zelda laughs merrily.

 

Zelda is every inch the queen as she reclines on her back, head on Hilda’s pillow. “Come here,” she commands, all traces of mirth gone.

 

Hilda gulps again. Her palms are sweating. She crawls toward the older witch, widening her legs awkwardly to straddle her. She feels clumsy and too heavy.

 

“Don’t perch;  _ sit.”  _ Zelda grasps her thigh and tugs until Hilda complies. Zelda is warm and solid, and after taking a moment to ascertain that her sister can still breathe, Hilda relaxes a little. 

 

_ Zelda cold and lifeless in the ground, no need to breathe. _

 

Hilda places her palm over the other woman’s heart. The strong, reassuring pulse seems to travel up her arm and reach her own heart.

 

Zelda’s touch is at first surprisingly soothing. She plays with soft blonde curls, traces the shell of Hilda’s ear, with a soft smile sweeter than any terms of endearment. She strokes her little button nose and lingers over her lips again.

 

“How I’ve dreamed of this mouth,” she says. Hilda’s response is primal, hips canting as heat blooms through her. Zelda’s index finger presses at the seam of her lips, and she takes it in eagerly, lapping at the smooth shiny nail and the rougher pad. She watches the way Zelda’s eyes darken until they are the color of storm clouds. 

 

The single digit is joined by another and Zelda thrusts once, sharply, as if reaching for a different part of her sister’s anatomy. Acting on pure instinct, Hilda wraps her lips around Zelda’s fingers and sucks; the moan this pulls from Zelda’s throat sends a hard throb through Hilda’s sex, and she knows they both feel the answering gush of wetness against Zelda’s stomach.

 

“Zel- _ da _ ,” she whines, surprised by her own impatience. 

 

Zelda smiles again. Her skin is splotchy, pupils blown, and Hilda is flying high on being the one to make her look like that. 

 

“There’s no reason to rush, sweet girl.” The backs of her wet fingers graze Hilda’s neck, tracing a path down to her soft belly, detouring to circle one stiff nipple.

 

Hilda whimpers, biting her lip. This has always been her ideal, a slow seduction revealing exactly how much her lover — and it’s Zelda, it’s really Zelda now, so she can stop pretending to herself that it’s some faceless other in her fantasies — cherishes her.

 

There’s only one problem.

 

“I’ve been waiting  _ so long _ , sister.”

 

Zelda likes that answer, if her harsh grunt is any indication. Her hands find Hilda’s hips, gripping, encouraging her until she rises and shuffles forward. Her knees are on either side of her sister’s head now; Hilda’s view is obscured by her own breasts and belly and her tuft of dark blonde pubic hair, but she can see Zelda’s strawberry waves fanned out over the pillow.

 

“Oh my,” she squeaks, “l -- like this?” Because surely this is an advanced, or at least intermediate, maneuver. 

 

Zelda’s hot breath in the crease of her thigh raises goosebumps. “This is what you wanted,” she says in a voice as dark as sin itself. Then, as if reading her mind, because Hilda imagined Zelda kneeling at her feet, “It’s better like this.”

 

The older witch doesn’t leave any more time to second-guess.

 

She expects a stroke or flick of the tongue, but what she gets is Zelda’s whole mouth, open and seeking, her nose nudging. She will be covered in Hilda now, and the younger woman feels wrong and raunchy for how much that thrills her. 

 

She makes a note to ask her sister to wear her red lipstick next time.

 

Zelda laps gently, a few introductory brushes, before stiffening her tongue and beginning in earnest. 

 

All at once Hilda is having trouble holding herself up on trembling legs. It has never been like this when she touches herself, so intense, not even with the awful, tantalizing prospect of waking Zelda. Zelda’s always-dangerous tongue pushes back the tiny hood of her clit and Hilda shrieks at the intensity, jerking away and then surging back toward her sister’s mouth. Dizzy with the sensations tingling through her, it takes her a moment to realize she’s likely suffocating Zelda — and right after they’d agreed not to murder one another.

 

“Oh, Satan’s fatted calf!” She could smack herself, because on top of everything else it’s the least sexy exclamation she knows. But Zelda looks more amused than annoyed, if rather red-faced.

 

One of her hands links with one of Hilda’s and brings it up to the headboard. She gives the hand a brisk pat before returning to grip Hilda’s hip, and Hilda, ever obedient, holds on for dear life.

 

Good thing.

 

Anyone else might go easy, taking into consideration that there’s a learning curve with such pursuits. 

 

Hilda shrieks again as Zelda sucks hard before reducing the pressure to nearly nothing. It’s too much and not enough all at once.

 

Eyes closed, she tries to follow Zelda’s movements, to decipher the shapes being drawn on her tender, exposed flesh, but she can’t. This is magic. The dark rush of pleasure punctuated by breathless anticipation is the highest form of sorcery.

 

Something has bothered Hilda this past century. She hadn’t understood how her proud, haughty sister couldn’t spare her loved ones a kind word but could kneel before a man and debase herself like that, his nasty cock in her mouth.

 

She has been so stupid.

 

Zelda is in total control. Why has she ever bothered with the Cain pit when this would have guaranteed perfect submission? 

 

Maybe Hilda will keep that to herself.

 

Or maybe not, the way she’s crying out Zelda’s name mingled with the Dark Lord’s.  

 

She’d be embarrassed, but she can tell Zelda likes it — she makes that snuffling, grunting sound of appreciation right into Hilda’s cunt.

 

A fingernail scratches through the course curls near her entrance, teasing, and Hilda stiffens. The characters in her novels can’t get off without penetration, it seems, and Hilda has tried it with her fingers and — things (maybe Zelda is right, she  _ is  _ a prude, Victorian even in her thoughts); she finds it rather distracting on the whole, and what Zelda is doing already is so very very  _ very _ nice. 

 

Zelda has more empathy than she lets on, perhaps. Instead of poking she presses and rubs, and  _ oh _ , that’s ever so nice. She is so close, and she hopes Zelda remembered a silencing charm or they’ll have to hex Ambrose and Sabrina; and what will happen the next time Zelda gets really angry; and how will Hilda react when she says something horrible after they’ve done this; and —

 

She is in grave danger of thinking herself right out of coming.

 

While her mouth is still busy, Zelda’s free hand grasps Hilda’s hip, urging her down more firmly to meet her mouth, setting a rough, urgent rhythm. She emits a moan, low and hungry and downright filthy. If Hilda had imagined that sex had a sound, this would have been it. The hand gripping her hip scrabbles up her side, down her arm, finds her hand and laces their fingers. Zelda squeezes hard, like a promise. 

 

Like love, maybe.

 

Hilda splits apart.

 

-

 

It’s too quiet after. Hilda finds herself straining all her senses to pick up a trace of what Zelda is feeling or thinking.

 

“Stop.”

 

“Stop what?”

 

“You very well know what.” She sounds irritated, but still wraps herself around Hilda and rearranges them so Hilda lies beside her. “I won’t have it. Reading mortals is one thing, but your own  _ sister _ , honestly.”

 

“It could have its advantages.”

 

“Hah! I  _ knew _ you could do it, you little prevaricator.” 

 

Hilda winces, unable to believe she’s been caught out so easily. “I’m… not sure exactly  _ what _ I can or can’t do, Zelds.” Zelda plays with her hair, doesn’t answer. “You have to admit, it  _ could _ have possibilities.”

 

The truth is Zelda needn’t worry; Hilda remains more frightened of learning her sister’s innermost secrets than Zelda could ever be of her learning them. But letting Zelda think she might attempt it could have unexpected benefits for Hilda’s own health. Loving Zelda unconditionally is one thing; cheerfully debauching and being debauched is jolly good; but trusting her is in a different category.

 

Zelda sighs, long-suffering. “Well… perhaps in a specific, limited arena.”

 

Hilda giggles. 

 

The sun is coming up. White sheep of the family that she is, Hilda has always loved daylight better than dark, but not today. If she knew a spell to enchant the sun, she’d use it to prolong this night.

 

“Hilda…”

 

She sounds serious, but she is still toying with her hair. Hilda keeps her breath even, determined not to assume the worst.

 

“Yes, sister?”

 

“I… You do know that I…”

 

“Yes, I know.”

 

She doesn’t, not fully, not totally; doesn’t want to. But for tonight — or today — she knows enough.

 

She knows death and sex are uneasy bedfellows.

 

She knows life without Zelda isn’t worth the living.

 

She knows they are both a little broken and twisted, wreathed in lust and shame.

 

She knows what it’s like to come in her sister’s mouth.

 

She knows that, when she really needs to, whether the magic is a dark art or a very human connection, she can read her Sphinx-like sister, tap into what she is thinking and feeling.

 

And she knows that has possibilities indeed.

  
  
  
  



End file.
